Shopify, with over 58 million page visits, is one of the top e-commerce platforms in the market for online retail businesses. For many e-commerce business owners around the globe, using e-commerce platform needs strong e-commerce SEO to drive traffic to their site. In this guide, I will share Shopify SEO tips to increase in organic traffic and growth has led to increased revenue, helping them to expand their online retail businesses exponentially.
Following are the reasons that why you should choose the Shopify E-commerce platform for your online business.
- It is highly flexible as it can tailor to your requirements.
- With its easy backend administration, you must have your Shopify store.
- It has lots of built-in tools.
- It is an advanced e-commerce platform with awesome SEO features.
- You don’t need to have extreme coding skills to manage and run your online store; you automatically save money and time.
Once you have your Shopify store, to perform to the best of its ability in search results, there’s still some Search Engine Optimization (SEO) legwork.
The below SEO guide tips are fundamental for attaining good search visibility for your Shopify e-commerce business.
Follow these easy guidelines to discover all the essentials for improving the SEO of your Shopify store.
After you set up Shopify, your online store, now you must be looking to implement SEO techniques.
Shopify is an advanced e-commerce shopping cart and content management system with built-in SEO elements.
But, let me tell you that e-commerce SEO is a little different than optimizing your websites.
For Shopify SEO, it is important to pay attention to site structure, structured data and see how SEO factors work when using Shopify.
By following these SEO tips, you can enhance the likelihood of getting organic sales and traffic to your Shopify store from search engines such as Yahoo, Bing, and Google.
You must follow these 12 points for improving the SEO of your SHOPIFY.
- Remove duplicate content.
- Create 100% unique “page title” and Meta descriptions for your pages.
- Optimize your images.
- Link your products page to the home page.
- Technical SEO of SHOPIFY store.
- Domain Canonicalization and Canonical tag.
- Submit Sitemap.xml to Google Search Console.
- Integration of Google Analytics.
- High-quality backlinks to your Shopify.
- Set up 301 redirects for Your old product pages
- Free Product Review App installation.
Table of Contents
Duplicate Content Removal
Duplicate content means the text that appears on more than one web page. That page could either be on someone else’s or on your own site.
For any website, duplicate content is a complete disaster if identified by a search engine, such as Yahoo, Bing, Google, or others, and the same is the case with your Shopify store.
When search engines identify that you’ve copied content on your Shopify store from another site, your store could be penalized by search engines.
The bad news is, many Shopify stores have copied content, so if you fix the problem, you have a chance to increase your search performance.
To check duplicate content, there are tools like Copyscape plagiarism checker.
Perform tests and checks as often as possible to make sure all of your content is 100% unique.
As per Google Content Guidelines, duplicate content is defined as:
“Duplicate content means substantive blocks of content across or within domains that is either exact copy of other content or are appreciably similar.”
How to Fix External Duplicate Content?
If you have set 301 redirects and canonicals, but there’s some duplicate content on your Shopify store, you have 2 options:
- If you think the other site owners copied you, contact the owner and ask them to change their text.
- But if you think you both used the same text (product description) from somewhere else, then edit and revise your text.
Unique Page Title & Meta Descriptions
Page titles and Meta descriptions are vital elements of a website for search engine rankings.
Your title tag and the Meta description tags must include the keywords relevant to your site’s content, whether it’s an article about fashion trends or a product page for a pair of shoes.
This unique metadata helps Google and other search engines understand about the page. The better search engines understand your page, the better it might rank your store in search engines.
Title & description must be written according to the SEO best practices; the ideal word count for the title should not be more than be 60 characters, while the description tag shouldn’t exceed more than 160 characters.
If you have many pages that need titles or keywords and descriptions, this is a lengthy process.
But for the optimization purpose, you should definitely do it.
Now let’s see how to edit Meta Titles And Descriptions of your Shopify store.
First of all, go to your Shopify store, tap on “Online Store”/Preferences. Here you can easily change your “Title and Description.”
Tip: Never use stop words, for example, “a”, “an,” “the”,” if”, “but” and “thus”.
Follow the format:
- Primary Keyword – Secondary Keyword | Brand Name
Image Optimization on Your Shopify Store:
For your Shopify store, Image optimization is another means of improving your store presence in search engines.
For years, it is of no surprise that “alt tags” have been used by search engines for understanding what the images on a site are about.
All your images must include the relevant keywords with proper alt tags.
For example, when someone is searching for images of red shoes, and if your images of “red shoes” have alt tags with good description,” then chances are that images from your site will also appear in search results.
Another thing to consider is, your customers/buyers with vision trouble might use a screen reader to check your site.
Now, if you have “alt tags,” they can verbally describe to the buyer about each image. The better your alt tag, the better you’ve chances to push the visitor to put something in their shopping cart.
Alt tags with good descriptions could be among many other ranking factors search engines use to assess your store.
So, my recommendation is to optimize every single image on your Shopify website.
Now let me share some key points to consider while creating alt-tags for your images.
- Use a unique and original “alt tag.”
- Add a proper description but do not stuff your keywords.
- Alt-tags must be short and concisely describe the image.
- For smaller images and buttons, do not add alt tags.
Steps to add alt text to Shopify:
- Go to your Shopify admin; now click Products/ All Products.
- Tap on the name of the product you want to edit.
- To edit alt text, hover over a product image and click on the 3 dots to add “alt text.”
- Once you are done, now click Save.
Link your Products Page to the Home Page
Your home page is the main and most powerful page of your website, among all others. Creating navigation links of your products on your homepage gives a clear path to your site visitors so they can check around your Shopify store.
If you are a store owner and don’t link your collection or category pages to your home page, your product pages may be hidden deep in the store, and visitors won’t find them easily.
Tip: Ensure your entire important product and collection pages are reachable at the top of the homepage. By doing this, these pages are in easy reach of your customers. Don’t forget to include a search box also.
Technical seo for shopify
In technical SEO, your webmaster needs to ensure the followings guidelines:
- Check a robots.txt file to crawl your site easily.
- Make sure your Shopify store has a sitemap.xml file.
- After creating a Google Search Console account, add the sitemap.xml to Google Search Console.
- Create and install Google Analytics.
- Validating CSS and HTML.
- Correct redirect issues and crawl errors.
- Ensure the proper use of heading tags (H1, H2, H3, H4).
- Correct application of domain canonicalization and canonical tags.
- Use Google’s Page Speed Insights to analyze your Shopify store’s speed on all devices.
Domain Canonicalization and Canonical Tag
When there are multiples of the same things, “Canonicalization” means to declare that one page or domain is the primary version.
For instance, if one style of “red shoes” comes in different shades and you have pages for each color, you might want to canonical to a single version. The reason is, all of the product descriptions will be the same.
This way, you are clearly sending a message to search engines, “ignore all the identical pages and focus on this single URL.”
It will keep search engines away from thinking that you have duplicate content on your site. But, overall, duplicate content is really bad for the SEO of your Shopify store.
Shopify Domain-Level Canonicalization:
Any Shopify store, on a domain level can have 3-4 versions:
Now, you need to understand that all of the above pages will display identical content to users, but in search engines, they appear to be different websites with the same text.
Log in to your Shopify store; now go to “Online Store” and click on “Domains.”
Choose your domain from the dropdown box, now tick “Redirect all traffic to this domain.”
Shopify Page-Level Canonicalization:
It involves setting canonical tags but don’t worry, as it’s not too complicated. But on Shopify, it can work a little differently than it does on other sites.
In simple words, a “canonical tag” is a way of telling Google that a particular URL is the preferred version to appear in search results.
To overcome the duplicate content issues of search engines, you must use a proper canonical tag.
For example, these dynamic URLs refer to a single(same) product.
- https://xyz.com/dresses/cocktail?gclid=ABCD
- https://www.xyz.com/dresses/green-dresses-are-awesome
- https://www.xyz.com/products?category=dresses&color=green
Among the above-shared URLs, the second should be the main version.
How to add a canonical tag?
Step 1. Go to your Shopify admin, click “Online Store,” and then go to “Themes.”
Step 2. Choose the theme you want to edit, now click “Actions,” and then “Edit code.”
Step 3. Under “Layout,” press “theme liquid.”
Step 4. Copy and paste the following code on the </head> tag and click save.
Add Sitemap.xml to Google Search Console
To tell search engines, what to index or crawl on the website, you need a sitemap where you can submit all the pages of your website.
Shopify sites automatically generate a sitemap.xml file that contains all the pages and products of your website, providing an excellent overview of your Shopify site structure.
But for picture-perfect SEO, submit your sitemap to Google Search Console, so your site can be easily indexed and crawled.
You can find the sitemap at the root directory of the Shopify store, For example, xyz.com/sitemap.xml.
Steps to submit Sitemap to Google Search Console
- Sign in to Google Search Console and click on your website URL.
- On the left menu bar, press on the sitemap and “Add Sitemap.”
It can take a few days to complete your request.
Google Analytics Integration
To track and report your Shopify store’s traffic, Google Analytics integration is a must to have. It is Google’s free tool with many features to help you analyze the following;
- See how people are behaving on your site.
- Keep an eye on your paid and organic traffic numbers.
- Know how long visitors spend time on your store or products.
Go to your Shopify store and now choose the “Admin” option. Now go to “Online Store” and then click “Preferences.”
Once there, paste your tracking ID code into the Google Analytics account.
High-Quality Backlinks to Your Shopify Store
If you want to increase the number of buyers to your Shopify store, along with on-page and off-page SEO, quality backlinks are an integral part of SEO.
An easy and quick way to get targeted and quality traffic to your Shopify is by creating your store profile on Amazon and other similar websites.
This will help you get strong backlinks and traffic in return as well, which will be a booster for your store.
Set Up 301 Redirects for Old Product Pages
In Shopify, when your product is out of stock, you need to tell Google and other search engines that a page is permanently moved to a new page or doesn’t exist; here, 301 redirects are the best possible solution.
What is a 301 redirect?
A 301 redirect is taking search engines and users away from one page and sending them onto another automatically.
301 redirect is also used when you don’t want people to visit a URL that no longer exists.
What happens when search engines or users go to such pages that don’t exist? They will get a ‘404 Error” page, potentially dropping or ending your visitors’ journey with you.
Without setting up a 301 redirect, if you’ve deleted pages for items that are not going to be in stock again, chances are you might lose your customers.
If you want to take the visitor to a new page, the best way is to create a URL redirect.
Let me tell you how to add 301 redirects in your Shopify store?
- Go to “Online Store” and then to “Navigation.” Now go to “URL Redirects” and click “Add URL redirect.”
- Replace the old URL in Redirect with the new URL and click add.
Install the Free Product Review App
One of the main benefits of using product reviews Shopify app is to increase sales of your products.
But the question is, what are some different types of Shopify Apps to optimize your store?
The answer is simple,
- Paid and free apps options are available, and you can check that out on the Shopify help center.
To add product reviews to your store and engage with your potential customers, Shopify Product Reviews is one of the best free apps.
Blog Feature of Your Shopify store
With a built-in blog feature, now writing blog posts is an incredible way to build your audience in your Shopify store, drive more traffic, earn more exposure & sales for your online store.
Regular and quality content is recommended because:
- Search engines send users to frequently updated sites.
- Good content makes your site more useful for visitors if they are looking for answers to their queries.
- Your blog content helps Google and other search engines understand the category of your store or the topic of your site.
- If your content is SEO optimized, you also can rank your post, driving more traffic to your store.
If you want to know how to add to and edit your blog on the Shopify platform, then Shopify explains it very well. It also covers how to use Android and iOS apps.
If you are unsure what to write about, then keyword research might be useful. When you write content on what people are typing into search engines, It gives you a clear idea of questions around your sell products.
Bottom Line
To be ahead of your competitors, all of the 12 steps mentioned above may be everything you should know about Shopify SEO.
These Shopify SEO guide tips will help you to drive more organic traffic from search engines.ide
I hope you enjoyed this article; now I’d like to hear from you. Which strategy from this blog do you want to use instantly?
Are you going to launch your Shopify blog or fix your duplicate content? Let me know in the comments section.
